Can Haiti Change?

Sidney W. Mintz

From Foreign Affairs, January/February 1995

Article preview: first 500 of 4,985 words total.

Summary:  The first U.S. occupation of Haiti lasted almost 20 years and, by creating a modern military, buttressed the forces that have historically polarized the nation. Now American soldiers are back. Will we repeat those mistakes? Or can Haiti-a nation born of a slave revolt, isolated by the discrimination of anxious European and American powers, and inflicted with a parasitic upper class-finally overcome its past? Real democracy will require economic transformation. America must pick a side in the class warfare that has immobilized Haiti for 200 years.

Sidney W. Mintz is William L. Straus, Jr., Professor of Anthropology, Johns Hopkins University.

A HISTORICAL CHALLENGE

Every nation is unique; no two are identical. But Haiti is in a class by itself, not because it is the hemisphere's poorest country or because no one there before President Jean?Bertrand Aristide had ever been elected by popular vote. Poverty and a lack of electoral politics, after all, typify societies spread across a substantial portion of the earth's surface. What makes Haiti unique is that no other nation in world history has ever been created by slaves. Those slaves wrested their weapons from the hands of their masters and then threw the masters out. What Spartacus was crucified for failing to do, the Haitian people did. Haiti's uniqueness inheres in that historical experience, and some features of it still figure in its political present and allow for predictions about its future. Of course background facts do not tell us what to do about Haiti. But not knowing them has led to some plans for Haiti that make relatively little sense of what is possible.

Haiti's current crisis, then, is historical. Even while conceding the very real importance of scanty resources, dilapidated infrastructure, and popular exhaustion, the forces that have helped keep Haiti immobilized (if not immobile) were in place soon after independence. In 1915, when the United States occupied Haiti for the first time, it strengthened those forces. Whether that mistake is repeated is the challenge of the latest American intervention. It is difficult to be anything but pessimistic. Haitian stability will depend on fundamental economic change -- change in the distribution of power to make economic decisions. That change seems extremely unlikely, not least because it will require time. For the current American intervention to accomplish anything more lasting in Haiti than feeding the hungry, repairing electric generators, and fixing roads will take the kind of extended commitment that a restless American electorate -- and a tired Haitian people -- may lack.

But looking ahead is difficult; looking back is far easier. What one sees in the past are a number of forgotten relevancies. They have to do with what Haiti once was, and with what its people did about it. So let's put predictions aside for the moment and look back.

GENESIS OF A REVOLUTION

It is strange, but true, that Haiti has never been forgiven by the West for refusing to tolerate the social and economic structure European intentions had installed in what was at the time a supremely profitable, seventeenth?century French colony. In 1791, the colony of St. Domingue, ceded to France by Spain in 1697, was the epicenter of a tropical new world. That world had been created by European empires to provide their citizens -- especially large new urban laboring populations -- with novel foods such as sugar and molasses, and "soft drugs" such as rum, coffee, and tobacco. Novelties in 1700, these were things with which Europe's laboring masses would soon become infatuated. It turned out to be convenient to produce such goods -- at enormous profit to ...

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